Frederick Taylor

An American engineer who worked his way through evening studies for his qualifications. From being an engineer in a steel company he became one of the first of a new breed of very influential management writers and theorists. He is known for defining the techniques of scientific management which is the study of relationships between people and tasks for the purpose of redesigning the work process to increase efficiency.

He was writing at a time when factories were creating big problems for management who needed new methods for dealing with the management challenges.

Taylor was one of the first to attempt to systematically analyze behaviour at work. His model was the machine therefore his ideas are often characterised as the machine model of organisations. Each task was broken down to its smallest unit to identify the best way to do each job. Then the supervisor, would teach it to the worker and make sure the worker did only those actions essential to the task.. This is why is it referred to as scientific management as Taylor attempted to make a science for each element of work and restrict alternatives to remove human variability or errors.

Taylor was not really concerned with other organisational or management issues, his focus was on efficiency.

Taylor believed that by increasing specialisation and the division of labour, the production process would become more efficient.

This process of could best be determined using scientific management techniques rather than informal "rule of thumb" knowledge.

Study the way workers perform their tasks, gather all the informal job knowledge possessed by workers, and experiment with ways of improving the way tasks are performed to increase efficiency.

Codify the new methods